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This page lists novels and non-fiction by Joseph Hone.

By Joseph Hone
- novels
- non-fiction

The Private Sector

Joseph Hone

1971

A Peter Marlow novel.

"Cairo, May 1967: Marlow is sent from London to find his friend and fellow spy Henry Edwards, who has vanished. In the course of this fool's errand he also finds his former wife, Bridget, now deeply entangled with Edwards. Marlow moves easily between British and Egyptian intelligence branches, attaching allegiance to neither - until he becomes the unwitting victim of a failed plot to topple Nasser."

The Sixth Directorate

Joseph Hone

1975

A Peter Marlow novel.

"In prison his name had been Marlow. When British Intelligence released him to impersonate a dangerous KGB agent, he became George Graham, a man with an incredible past and a highly questionable future. But even the British didn't know everything about Graham, as Marlow discovered. Then he came face-to-face with Graham's mistress and thought the game was up. But it was just beginning."

The Paris Trap

Joseph Hone

1977

"Jim Hackett and Harry Tyson first met in Paris, in days of hope - Hackett a promising actor, Tyson a budding writer. Twenty years later, their dreams soured, they are reunited in Paris for a substantive project: Hackett, now a movie actor, has been cast in a major film derived from a spy novel authored by Tyson, who now works for British intelligence. But the plot of the film, concerning a Palestinian terrorist cell, is about to be overtaken in the dramatic stakes by real events."

The Flowers of the Forest

Joseph Hone

1980

A Peter Marlow novel. Published in the US as The Oxford Gambit.

"It is an idyllic setting: the sunlit forest sweeping down to the valley, the heather loud with bees. But one hive stands dismantled and a man has vanished - Lindsay Phillips, section head in the Secret Service. Marlow thinks he has left the world of espionage behind, but unexpected pressures lead him to take up the search for Phillips - whereupon he is caught up in a web of violence and intrigue."

The Valley of the Fox

Joseph Hone

1982

A Peter Marlow novel.

"Marlow believes he is done with the insane world of espionage, having found a haven in the Cotswolds with his wife and step-daughter. Then gunfire shatters the night and he is forced to run for cover into the nearby woodland. Marlow finds himself in a landscape that has become suddenly, venomously hostile. And when sinister vengeance from Africa reaches deep into rural England, he must turn savage to rescue his terrified step-daughter and make good his escape."

Summer Hill

Joseph Hone

1990

"A novel about a great Irish house, Summer Hill, and three generations of women who live in it between the 1890s and World War II."

Return to Summer Hill

Joseph Hone

1990

"Continues the story begun in 'Summer Hill', a novel about a great Irish house, Summer Hill, and three generations of women who live in it between the 1890s and World War II."

Firesong

Joseph Hone

1997

"New Year's Day, 1906. A family celebrates, skating on the ice of a vast lake, far north in Russia. Cousins of the Romanov Tsars, this is the Rumovsky family - Prince Pyotr, his wife Princess Sofia, their son Ivan and twins Yelena and Alexander, and their young Irish governess, Miss Harriet. With them is the patriarch of the family, old Prince Mikhail, a strange, towering figure, a man from another century, with his fabulous Boyars' court at the castle, a Tamburlaine of the snows . . . Behind the Rumovsky family and their mediaeval island castle lie 300 years of autocratic but peaceful rule. Ahead of them, the old Prince expects the same for his descendants. It is not to be. Firesong is the story of the Rumovskies - their lives, deaths and hazardous escapes in the nightmarish new Russia that soon engulfs them: a land stricken by famine, pestilence, war and death. A story both intimate and epic."

Goodbye Again

Joseph Hone

2011

"Ben Contini, a disenchanted painter of considerable talent, has just buried his mother. Rifling through the attic of her Kilkenny house he stumbles across a Modigliani nude, worth millions. Determined to learn the provenance of the painting, he and Elsa, a disturbed and secretive woman who accosts him at the funeral, become embroiled in the sinister world of Nazi art theft. But they are not the only one with an interest in the painting... Together they set off on a frantic journey that leads them from Dublin to France via the Cotswolds, down the Canal du Midi into Italy. The intrigue surrounding the shadowy half-truths about their exotic families becomes increasingly sinister as Ben and Elsa are forced to confront their pasts and their buried demons."

The Dancing Waiters

Joseph Hone

1975

"Some Collected Travels".

Gone Tomorrow

Joseph Hone

1981

"Some More Collected Travels".

Children of the Country: Coast to Coast Across Africa

Joseph Hone

1986

This book was probably published in the US as Africa of the Heart: A Personal Journey.

"For those who like to read, in comfort, about uncomfortable journeys, frightful hotels, dreadful meals, and broken-down capitals, I strongly recommend Children of the Country. The section on Kinshasha, in particular, is both alarming and hilarious."

Duck Soup in the Black Sea: Further Collected Travels

Joseph Hone

1988

Wicked Little Joe

Joseph Hone

2009

"'In the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to Dublin.'Thus begins this extraordinary memoir by travel writer and novelist Joseph Hone, one of eight children farmed out by impecunious and inebriate parents, who was raised at Maidenhall in County Kilkenny by the historian and essayist Hubert Butler and his wife Peggy, sister of Tyrone Guthrie of Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan. The story is told through a cache of letters discovered on Hubert Butler's death between him and his friend 'Old Joe', Little Joe's grandfather and biographer of Yeats and George Moore, upon whom fell the financial responsibility for his grandson's upbringing. This account of his childhood and youth during the 1940s and 50s in rural Ireland among the privileged and artistic elite of his generation living down-at-heel if comfortable lives in a newly emergent state, is an enthralling reminder of the happenstance and precariousness of all our lives."